From a recent story about Google Fiber entitled "Good news for Google Fiber: Broadcast TV audiences are cratering faster than ever":

Google Fiber and its ilk may be the final straw that will break the back of broadcast television. Once high-speed video downloading becomes widely available, instant access to VOD services will make them even more appealing…

…What makes this possible is the complete paralysis of the broadcast dinos. All the majors are frozen in terror, repeating old behavioral patterns that turned self-destructive years ago. NBC spent the annual defense budget of Mauritius to promote “Ready for Love,” a tired Bachelor clone. ABC is going to build its autumn slate on “Scandal”, “Revenge” and “Betrayal,” as well as a hasty spin-off of its fading “Once Upon a Time” franchise. ABC also handed Robin Williams a comeback vehicle. Sensing desperation, audiences are tuning out in disgust.

Not untrue, so far as it goes. And, without figures to hand so yeah pinch of salt, but I think the US network tv “hits” of last season, like REVOLUTION, would have been woeful cancellation fodder even four years ago.  I don’t know that the hit on Robin Williams is especially called for: the man’s a giant, but I haven’t seen the pilot of the show in question and I haven’t completely forgiven him for PATCH ADAMS.

I’m kind of curious as to how it apparently took Google Fiber, in this writer’s estimation, to make Netflix irresistible.  In the office here at home, I’ve got about 20 mbps down and Netflix fairly rips along.  Perhaps we’re talking about a higher resolution stream or something.

I think it’s worth admitting, now, that “television” has become one of those legacy words, like “phone,” that we use to point at a thing, without really fully describing it.  What do you mean, now, when you say “television”?  HOUSE OF CARDS and HEMLOCK GROVE?  HAUNTING MELISSA on the iPad?  Serialised (periodical) narrative?  Shot for a small screen?  Maybe.  It certainly doesn’t mean what it used to.

(And, obviously, I’m only talking about scripted tv there.  You could make an argument that “pure” television is presentational, or “reality,” or documentary.)

The term is becoming protean. The scheduling of television has quickly become meaningless, and it’s hard to describe to kids of a certain culture how there was once a time when you had to watch tv shows when they were broadcast, in realtime, because you might never see them again.  Time was, the BBC wiped their own tapes.  Now a significant number of people watch most of their selected BBC output in a timeshifted manner through the iPlayer.

When Amazon start commissioning drama series to follow their comedy and kid’s slates, television is going to take a new turn.  Not only are Amazon in a position to take chances, but they have possibly the best analysis in the world of what people watch and will pay money for.  Just crunch down that DVD-box-set data by year and genre.  Amazon could actually own genre drama television within eighteen months if they chose to, either by Nate-Silvering those numbers or simply by creating five times as many productive relationships with important creators than anyone else can.

Cable, both basic and premium, have gotten their whacks in, but the full-on “disruption” of American tv by deep-pocketed internet business is going to be really interesting, not least for what disrupts them.

Developing/not fully baked.

Kieron Gillen unwittingly provides the slogan for the Tumblr years.  (via)

It’s not a bad one, as accidental slogans go.  (Though I am still sad that “It’s all about control, Luigi” never caught on.  It could have been the new “son i am disappoint.”)  Though it’s interesting to me that Tumblr’s own gif tumblr hasn’t been active in months.  The Storyboard team there got fired recently, replaced by an algorithmic solution to surfacing content that was rolled back the same day because it didn’t work.  Amusingly, it turned out today that the statement about the Storyboard group firing was actually written by one of them.

It’s a very Tumblr thing.  Kieron’s tumbling through the servers now, alive and looping as pure Tumblarity.  Tumblr loves nothing more than a GIF.

I don’t have much of a presence on Tumblr, but I like it there.  I loved the early tumblelogs that Tumblr moved so quickly to emulate, and what they’ve made out of that cheeky sticky-fingeredness is quite remarkable.  Especially given that they seem to have no visible business model beyond convincing investors to give them money.  Which, I guess, is also impressive: until such time as they have to monetise and their actions in that regard impinge on the tastes of a user base sometimes as touchy and rabid as the old LiveJournal crowd. 

I’d like to think that Tumblr will solve their obvious problems before they crash down like asteroids.  I’d also like to think that most users have copies of their most-loved Tumblr posts.  The year of All I Want To Be Is A GIF would be a very sad thing to look back on, if it turned out you’ve died when the servers were switched off.

Was going through an old notebook, and found these notes for a talk I did at the AA – the first Thrilling Wonder Stories event, I guess.  See if you can decipher my handwriting while I attempt to write a new story for Thrilling Wonder Stories’ organiser Liam Young, as an element of the ongoing Under Tomorrow’s Sky project to imagine new iterations of the city.  You can learn more about Under Tomorrow’s Sky here, where there are lots of pictures and videos.

Super interesting forced experiment: have no Internet for 2 days, then get only 30 minutes – what is top priority?

— Sean Bonner (@seanbonner) March 31, 2013

This actually made me sit back for a minute, oddly.  I thought perhaps that I’m too used to grazing.  But it also occurs to me that the ubiquity of a thing perhaps, eventually, makes it less important.

I spent my 30 mins skimming email & twitter for anything urgent and then quick updates on twitter & vine & flickr

— Sean Bonner (@seanbonner) March 31, 2013

Email, obviously.  That’s where my work and most of my personal connections live.  It’s unlikely that I would allow a situation where I didn’t have relatively instant and painless access to email, unless I’d specifically selected a location for that purpose and warned people in advance.

If I only had thirty minutes?  I don’t know that I’d open Twitter.  Twitter DMs propagate through to my email, after all.  If it was necessary to update, I’d take a photo in WhoSay, or in Instagram with an appropriate IFTTT trigger tag, so that the photo autoposted to several services, including this site, Twitter and Tumblr.

I’d probably open Google Reader in some form, and skim the top of the news.

What dawned on me, a little bit, in thinking about that, is that social networks really bring me very little.  Twitter’s great for realtime news if your stream is tuned well, of course.  But I have no personal inbound from Twitter, Tumblr, G+ or anywhere else.  For me, social networks have become pervasive to the point of being old wallpaper.  (At some point, there’s probably a longer thing to be written called All The Clever Social Apps I Deleted Off My Phone Because There Was Nobody In The Room.  Which reminds me, I can delete Facebook off my phone now!)

What do you think?  If you only had thirty minutes, what would you consider it necessary to use the internet for?

Snapchat gets used for sexting a lot.  Sure.  I get that.  I’m not sure, however, if the monstrous volume of messages the service is apparently processing can all be ascribed to sexting.  I tested it with a few people, and I have a feeling a big part of the appeal is that it treats photos and video as if they were as ephemeral as texting.  Most texts, after all, are things that exist purely in their moment and then become landfill in the back of your phone.  Over the years, I’ve several times watched my kid have to shovel out the back of her phone so she has room to receive texts again.  Some texts, you want to save, sure.  Most, you have to delete after receiving, or go back later to clear them out because they’re just laying there.

It’s not a leap to think that inspecific, fun photos and video messages could be treated the same way.  It’s saying hello.  For ten seconds.  What’s more transient than saying hello?  What’s more insubstantial but pleasing, really, than a message meaning “I just thought of you.”  You don’t necessarily want or need to permanently store every single instance of someone saying hello.

It’s no wonder Facebook hacked together a competitor in a hurry.  That sort of drive-by informational traffic is their wheelhouse.  It’s no wonder that more secure variants of the Snapchat idea, like Wickr, are popping up.  There’s all kinds of potential in transient self-destructing communication.  (There are arguments as to how secure Wickr is, obviously, just as Snapchat itself is not as opaque as it would like to present itself.)

It’s a more interesting idea that you might immediately expect, to bat around, with considerable speed, fast-expiring audiovideo content that doesn’t pile up in your storage. 

But, yes, it’s probably used mostly for sexting.

Here’s a thing, though.  We used to say that porn was a major driver of online technologies.  Here in 2013, though, the vast majority of porn content is home-made or made to appear so.  So, perhaps, that old adage still holds true, and the Snapchat experience could be the future of something.

Anyway, I’m going out to drink a lot.  And I’ve already deleted the Snapchat app from my phone, for the safety of everyone.

After I posted this raw braindump yesterday, a few people called me out on this bit:

I wonder what happens when Google decide to look at TV interfaces, long expected to be an Apple focus going forward.

Because, of course, there is such a thing as Google TV, and has been for a couple of years, along with airy claims about half the new TVs in America being fitted with it  Which may be true.  I don’t live there, after all.  But I will say that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about Google TV.  Wikipedia (yeah, I know) notes:

Cable providers as well as content providers have been slow to warm to Google TV. NBC, ABC, Fox,^[47] CBS and Hulu have blocked Google TV enabled devices from accessing their web content since Google TV’s launch

Here’s what I was thinking.  From one perception, there are two Googles.  There’s the Google that fiddle-farts around with stuff just to have a foot in that space.  The Google that made Orkut, for instance.  And then there’s the Google that released a fleet of camera trucks into the wild in order to make a free online street-level interactive map of the world.

Google TV, as it stands now, strikes me as the former.  A TV guide, a TV browser, Send To TV – these all seem like play to me.

But what prompted the thought was recent developments, in the last few weeks – additions to the platform, moves to become a spectrum database, and the like.  What if they put together a larger and more directed team, with the mandate to go from, if you like, from Google Wave to Google Street View, with the freedom to go nuts, reach for the sky and iterate like all hell?  The full NASA, as it were.  Actually looking very hard at the problem with the intent of claiming the space.

(They’ve made some interactivity hires recently that kind of informed my speculation, too.)

Anyway.  That’s what I was thinking.  Google hasn’t done TV yet.  Not really.  But they could.

Originally written at the weekend for my newsletter.  Which fell into a spam abyss, so most people didn’t see it.

I get oddly annoyed at my phone.  I’ve been using smartphones since the 90s, and I am annoyed at how stupid it still is.  Which is a stupid thing to be annoyed about.  (Unless you, too, have been travelling outside your country of origin and didn’t have the time/energy to sort out a local SIM card with a data plan (possibly because you had an international plan in place that seemed to have inexplicably evaporated), and so spent a few weeks manually throttling your cellular so you didn’t rack up a £1000 bill.)

Nested parentheses.  I should quit while I’m ahead.  But I’m always bugged by how my phone seems never to be working hard enough.  I’ve just, finally, found a podcast app I like, Downcast, which does the thing I thought was bloody obvious: it automatically downloads podcasts itself, and syncs information between all my instances of the app (iPhone and iPad).  How was that hard?  Really?  I’m baffled — but fucking Apple couldn’t do it.  iTunes would never do it without a cable connection, and their Podcasts app isn’t fit for purpose.

I don’t think it’s arrogant or demanding, these days, to expect that a (yes okay I have disposable income) premium smartphone should bring me stuff (yes okay like a slave shush).  That said, I’m starting to get the sense that Android may do that job better.  In fact, in many respects, I’m getting the sense for the first time that I may have backed the wrong mobile-OS horse.  I am looking particularly at Google’s hires of late, and the appearance that they seem prepared to spend their money.  I wonder what happens when Google decide to look at TV interfaces, long expected to be an Apple focus going forward. 

What happens when Google’s field of interests do not directly intersect Apple’s as such, but simply surround them?  Cutting off the bridges of intent that Apple have been slow to lay, and putting a commercial moat of sorts around Apple?

I’d rather that than the technological equivalent of a coalition government, in which no risks are taken and no forward motion is achieved.

Download wristbands.

What’s a download wristband?  Simple: imagine a sleek, customized download card you can wear around your wrist.  Each one comes with a unique code, redeemable on CDBaby.com for a free album or single download. Use download wristbands at your next concert. Instead of stamping wrists or using the venue’s wristbands, you can arrange for the door-person at your next show to put a download wristband on everyone who comes into the venue. Then your fans can take your music home with them after the show.

Now imagine that for digital books, of all kinds.  Imagine handing those out at a launch party or speaking gig or panel appearance or some such, or seeding them at a show or other event or gathering.

Somewhat more interesting and elegant than being given a scrap of paper.  A hell of a lot easier than shipping a few crates of books (especially if you’re a self-publisher or, of course, a digital-only publisher).

There’s something to be said for learning from the awful, twisting spasms of the music industry.

I’ve already talked about the first instalment of John Scalzi’s serialised sf novel THE HUMAN DIVISION here.  I read parts two to five on the train into London today – I’ve been getting them auto-delivered every week, and intended to read a couple of parts on the plane, but got into David Byrne’s HOW MUSIC WORKS instead.  (Still on track for a book a week in 2013, if you squint at it.)  Anyway.

What I wanted to briefly note down is this.  This is a thirteen-part serial.  Each piece takes no less than ten or fifteen minutes to read, I think.  Some, like the first episode, are much bigger.  He’s taking a risk by varying the length of the episodes so dramatically, but I think he’s getting away with it.  Each piece is costing me 99 American cents, or 64p.  An mp3 runs me 99p on iTunes.  A tv episode costs £2.49 on iTunes.  Each episode of THE HUMAN DIVISION automatically downloads to my Kindle. 

In modern-day terms, this is the equivalent of a cable television show season happening – but in a deeply participatory “cool” medium, and with a greater informational density than other cool media like tv or even comics.

It’s the instant nature of the ebook, with its automagic form of broadcast, that’s the killer.  If there was a single serious misstep, it was that the publisher did not negotiate with Amazon (I don’t know if it’s true for other vendors) to create a one-click subscription for all thirteen parts.  Perhaps that was impossible.  I certainly would have liked it, though.

While companies like Netflix attempt to embrace the “novel for television” by making all thirteen parts of HOUSE OF CARDS available simultaneously, it’s interesting to see Scalzi and Tor go the other way by testing not a traditional serialisation but a “television season for novel.”  The walls of the current standard of container are getting bent a little.

You can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Stephen King’s forays into periodical serial had been taken in the spring days of the e-reader, tablet and smartphone.

Yes, doing digital-only or (in this case) digital-first still feels a little exclusionary.  But, honestly?  Is it any more economically exclusionary than publishing in hardback?  And it’s not like there’s not a substantial digital-first audience out there.

I don’t pretend to be informed enough to know if THE HUMAN DIVISION constitutes a signal suite of breakthroughs in publishing.  But it’s the one in front of me, and it’s gotten me thinking.  There’s a beauty to the idea of signing up to receive the digital broadcast of a prose serial.  Buying a season of book and having each piece magically appear every week.  And, conceivably, reaching an audience that won’t or can’t hit bookstores, through the developing momentum of word-of-mouth over thirteen weeks.  And, frankly, getting to talk to people for an entire season, one week at a time.

Not Fully Baked, as a thought.  But it’s nagging at me.  There’s more to unpack, but I wanted to get this down now.

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

Google+, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a social network. Most people can’t see what other people are doing there. Google, of course, sees it all. But everyone knows that going in.

It feels like the social web is going to get somewhat less interesting for a while. Less connected, less engaged.

Twitter’s going to be used for tv ratings in the States now. The clever thing about that it that it serves the same purpose as Facebook Likes: it documents media preferences. These are the things that keep a free service free, of course. But, god, there have to be less banal and creepy ways to do it.

I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites.

[Instagram: I said on that service earlier that I'll wait and see. Some hours later, they released an update to their TOS that I haven't had a good look at yet. But all my Instagram photos were backed up when Facebook bought them, and that backup auto-updates every time I post.]

I was re-reading a bunch of James Bridle over the last couple of days – his brain works very differently to mine, and much better, which makes his stuff a good lever to prise me off old tracks – and I tripped over this, which I bookmarked last year:

What would a hauntological literature look like? I’m not sure, and that makes me suspicious.

And, a few paragraphs further up, related:

While I understand the distinction between nostalgia and hauntology, I am unconvinced by their separation in the application of the latter to music. The two most frequently cited sonic hauntologists are Burial and Ghost Box records, and while I’m a huge fan of both, I also see them as being steeped in nostalgia.

Bridle, as you may know, coined the term New Aesthetic, which can be defined as the observation of the eruption of the digital world into the physical world.  And it occurred to me that there is already an artifact of hauntological literature that does not require or involve nostalgia.  It is, in fact, one of the historical artifacts that was such a touchstone for modern hauntology.

THE CHANGES.  A BBC TV series from 1975.  The first episode of which I recall vividly, because it was (if you were seven years old) so unsettling.  And the subject of this series was simply this:

The eruption of the historical into the present.

Which is, essentially, what Burial was doing, in the moments when he wasn’t (as in “Raver”) specifically summoning up past times through nostalgia or yearning.  The moments where the past can be heard leaking through the walls (in my head, there’s a weird linkage between Burial and Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”).

I think my problem with hauntology is that it deals with the problem of the future by going back to the past. And that is fine: but it will not save us.

In a hauntological literature, the future isn’t the problem.  It’s that the past never stops coming to get us.  Hence the frequent Ballardian framing of hauntology: we’re so exhausted by our blind headlong run into the future that we now wander around in a confused haze, and Time (SAPPHIRE AND STEEL!) oozes in like oil all around us.  Dragging us downstream.

Georteyphobia.  Fear of history.